Battlefield 1 boasts one of the most-viewed video game trailers of all time on YouTube, and it's not hard to see why. The game's unique, has a setting that has never been fully explored in a video game in the form of World War I and is a breath of fresh air in a genre that has too long been preoccupied with sci-fi or modern military battles.
Part of what makes WWI such a great setting for a Battlefield game is the wide variety of weapons that were invented for and used during the war. A new trailer for Battlefield 1 looks at some of those weapons in depth, while the developers at DICE open up about why the weaponry of the era makes for such a unique gameplay sandbox.
"There's a huge variety of weapons in this war," game designer Martin Kopparhed says in the video below. "Everything from clubs and very medieval, brutal close-quarters weapons to fast firing machine guns and sub-machine guns."
While the team at DICE is looking to recreate the authentic look and sound of the weapons in the game, as shown in the video below, they aren't going for 100 percent historical accuracy.
"We're not recreating the old, the past," Christofer Brandtieng says. "We're taking that as an inspiration and then we're trying to take this into a modern perspective."
Even though most players have never experienced a modern video game set during WWI and might only be vaguely familiar with the war in general, much of it should be readily familiar to FPS gamers. That's because WWI was the birthplace of the modern war.
"World War I was the birth of a lot of the things that we take for granted in modern warfare," design director Lars Gustavsson says. "All of these tools were created for a special purpose, right there, right now, they needed to solve a problem. And they come up with this variety of tools."
Battlefield 1 arrives on Xbox One, PS4 and PC on Oct. 21. A Battlefield television series is also in the works. You can read more about that here.
For those still playing Battlefield 4, the game's "China Rising" DLC is currently free on all platforms until Aug. 9. The DLC is being given away as part of EA and DICE's ongoing "Road to Battlefield 1" promotion, which has seen sales on Battlefield 4 and Battlefield Hardline alongside numerous free DLC packs.
